A vast multitude of items have been sold via eBay auctions on a daily basis. Everything from toy soldiers, to chairs to Star Wars cookie jars to Barbie dolls to music boxes. These items tend to differ greatly in size and weight, and necessitate a panicked search on many occasions for not only a cardboard box of suitable size, but also packing/cushioning materials (bubble wrap, foam noodles, cardboard, shredded paper, etc.) that would safeguard box contents.
FIG. 1 shows a prior art cardboard box along with many of the available cushioning materials—frequently more costly than the cardboard box itself—that are utilized to pad a boxed object.
A vast segment of the shipping industry utilizes cardboard boxes, and the new material described herein is not meant to replace all of them. Whenever a manufacturer of DVD players, for example, needs to ship 50,000 identical units, it is known beforehand what the dimensions will be for a suitable shipping box, and there is economy in ordering huge numbers of boxes of identical size. It should be noted that in the industry segment that ships electronic components, that the custom foam or other internal structures frequently rival the cost of the box itself.
Alternatively, the unique material shown in the illustrative embodiment provide a viable alternative due to economy of scale that can be employed in its manufacture: It can be molded in one piece (bonding 2 pieces would be a viable alternative), in contrast to the larger number of packaging components found in the referenced example of a DVD player shipping box, which at a minimum would consist of the box and custom foam forms. Other components—even toys—commonly use not only foam but additional cardboard inner boxes and braces.
The illustrative embodiments described herein permit packaging, protecting, and quickly shipping dozens of variably sized items to various customers that were winners of my eBay auctions. The illustrative embodiments allow creation of self-cushioned, variable sized boxes that are believed to be an improvement for not only my own shipping needs, but for many other people's preparation of packages for gifts and various other items. FIG. 2 illustrates some of the diverse items that have been laboriously packaged and shipped as part of eBay auction activities.
The illustrative embodiments offer a dramatic improvement in the way internet merchants and many other purveyors of variable size and weight items can conveniently package and simultaneously protect even fragile items, and also may indeed offer a viable alternative to industries that ship many identical items.
The illustrative embodiments described herein may comprise a material with outer flat and inner cushioned layers for fabricating shipping and gift boxes of various sizes, to handle items of diverse dimensions and weights. The material may be of variable density foam or a bonded material that, for example, includes: A flat outer surface—thin, strong sheet that will remember a right angle bend after scoring or hand-flexing; and molded or bonded to the sheet's inner surface, a grid of right-angle pyramid shapes that will consist of plastic closed cell, other foam or alternative material soft enough to cushion fragile items placed inside a variable sized box made from the subject material. The base of each pyramidal form may be the same dimensions for a given piece or run of the material, but the material may be available in different size sheets and pyramid sizes, depending the dimensions and weight of the items to be boxed. Because in this implementation all of the pyramidal shapes are right angle pyramids at their peaks, the larger their base dimensions, the taller the pyramid. Hence, thicker cushioning will be provided for larger, heavier, or more fragile items by pyramids with larger bases. The right angle pyramids will allow easy scoring and bending of the material, and each right angle formed for the box under construction will have one right angle pyramid abut another, forming a larger right angle pyramid that along with the bend in the material sheet will afford great rigidity to the finished box. Excess material will be easily scored and trimmed away for future use or utilized as additional box padding, especially if multiple items are packed in one box. Transparent, strong tapes either provided with a “kit” including the subject material sheet, or a generally available packaging tape, will be used to seal the outer, flat box surfaces in the same way that a conventional cardboard box is sealed.